Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council?the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community.

The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or columns have taken note of its central conclusion:

The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players?similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century?will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.

In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"?probably the single most powerful country?but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"?not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others?will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.

America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend, the NIC concluded. "U.S. preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant to the security concerns of most Asians," the report states. The authors don't dismiss the importance of the terror war?far from it. But they do write that a "key question" for the future of America's power and influence is whether U.S. policy-makers "can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by China." If not, "U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S. Asian allies would increase the likelihood that they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon and allow China to create its own regional security that excludes the United States."

To the extent that these new powers seek others to emulate, they may look to the European Union, not the United States, as "a model of global and regional governance."

This shift to a multipolar world "will not be painless," the report goes on, "and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular" with further outsourcing of jobs and outflow of capital investment. In short, the NIC's forecast involves not merely a recalibration in the balance of world power, but also?as these things do?a loss of wealth, income, and, in every sense of the word, security.

The trends should already be apparent to anyone who reads a newspaper. Not a day goes by without another story about how we're mortgaging our future to the central banks of China and Japan. The U.S. budget deficit, approaching a half-trillion dollars, is financed by their purchase of Treasury notes. The U.S. trade deficit?much of it amassed by the purchase of Chinese-made goods?now exceeds $3 trillion. Meanwhile, China is displacing the United States all across Asia?in trade, investment, education, culture, and tourism. It's also cutting into the trade markets of Latin America. (China is now Chile's No. 1 export market and Brazil's No. 2 trade partner.) Asian engineering students who might once have gone to MIT or Cal Tech are now going to universities in Beijing.

Meanwhile, as the European Union becomes a coherent entity, the dollar's value against the euro has fallen by one-third in the past two years (one-eighth just since September). As the dollar's rate of return declines, currency investors?including those who have been financing our deficit?begin to diversify their holdings. In China, Japan, Russia, and the Middle East, central bankers have been unloading dollars in favor of euros. The Bush policies that have deepened our debt have endangered the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.

What is the Bush administration doing to alter course or at least cushion the blow? It's hard to say. During Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings last week, Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D?Md., raised some questions about the nexus between international economics and political power. Rice referred him to the secretary of the treasury.

The NIC issued the report a few weeks before Bush?s inaugural address, but it serves to dump still more cold water on the lofty fantasy of America delivering freedom to oppressed people everywhere. In Asia, the report states, "present and future leaders are agnostic on the issue of democracy and are more interested in developing what they perceive to be the most effective model of governance." If the president really wanted to spread freedom and democracy around the planet, he would (among other things) need to present America as that "model of governance"?to show the world, by its example, that free democracies are successful and worth emulating. Yet the NIC report paints a world where fewer and fewer people look to America as a model of anything. We can't sell freedom if we can't sell ourselves.

--------------------You're here because you know something.
What you know you can't explain,
But you feel it;
You've felt it your entire life.
That there's something wrong with the world.
You don't know what it is, but it's there....
Like a splinter in your mind...
Driving you mad.

i look forward to the time when the US isnt the power base of the world. let others police the world, bail out weak countries monitarily, give enough foreign aid that if not given, would create a surplus on it's own.

i look forward to the day an american soldier only dies defending american soil. a day when our government will stop paying farmers NOT to grow crops because the population in countries that are prospering is swelling to a point where food can be a major export.

that is how the "war on terrorism" will be won. when it gets to the point where the US doesnt have the muscle to push around the rest of the world, our expansionist mindset will, hopefully, end. with our troops protecting our border and not policing the rest of the world and our farmers feeding the population boom that comes with a prosperous country (see, babyboomers), people will have no reason to try to attack us.

The fate of the U.S. in fifteen years. Ha my friend, we will be lucky if our economy will last 10 yrs. I have just recently started peeking into our economic stance, as well as the way "the Man" (meaning the government) is run. I can just about say that I am ashamed to be American. I recently studied an article in a recent Rolling Stone. It stated that Pharmaceutical companies have been paying of politicians over $879,000 to keep slipping sneaky bills onto the steps of Capitol Hill. Why??? A wonderful preservative that your kids more than likely received through a vaccination of some type, be it flu shot or MMR vacc. The preservative is DEADLY!!!!! It Causes Autism in thousands of kids born btwn 89 and 03. Elli Lillie Knew this preservative caused Mercury to gather in the brain. Killing off Cells needed for Development, why the article???? THE US GOV TRIED TO CONCEAL THE INFO FROM THE PUBLIC!!!!!!!! the gov didn't want us to know b/c there are thousands of parents who are putting 2 and 2 2gether. The intern want compensation for a fucked up kid. I would to. But "the man" says the lawsuits would DAMAGE our defenses in Bio-Warfare.

Quote:A wonderful preservative that your kids more than likely received through a vaccination of some type, be it flu shot or MMR vacc. The preservative is DEADLY!!!!! It Causes Autism in thousands of kids born btwn 89 and 03. Elli Lillie Knew this preservative caused Mercury to gather in the brain. Killing off Cells needed for Development, why the article???? THE US GOV TRIED TO CONCEAL THE INFO FROM THE PUBLIC!!!!!!!! the gov didn't want us to know b/c there are thousands of parents who are putting 2 and 2 2gether. The intern want compensation for a fucked up kid. I would to.

The "thimerosal causes autism" bullshit has been thoroughly debunked by every international study ever done on it. It was nonsense when it was first proposed, and it remains nonsense today. I suggest you pick a different target.

Quote:Huevos said:The fate of the U.S. in fifteen years. Ha my friend, we will be lucky if our economy will last 10 yrs. I have just recently started peeking into our economic stance, as well as the way "the Man" (meaning the government) is run. I can just about say that I am ashamed to be American. I recently studied an article in a recent Rolling Stone. It stated that Pharmaceutical companies have been paying of politicians over $879,000 to keep slipping sneaky bills onto the steps of Capitol Hill. Why??? A wonderful preservative that your kids more than likely received through a vaccination of some type, be it flu shot or MMR vacc. The preservative is DEADLY!!!!! It Causes Autism in thousands of kids born btwn 89 and 03. Elli Lillie Knew this preservative caused Mercury to gather in the brain. Killing off Cells needed for Development, why the article???? THE US GOV TRIED TO CONCEAL THE INFO FROM THE PUBLIC!!!!!!!! the gov didn't want us to know b/c there are thousands of parents who are putting 2 and 2 2gether. The intern want compensation for a fucked up kid. I would to. But "the man" says the lawsuits would DAMAGE our defenses in Bio-Warfare.

Perhaps you should look into another scholarly journal other than Rolling Stones.

Quote:Huevos said:The fate of the U.S. in fifteen years. Ha my friend, we will be lucky if our economy will last 10 yrs. I have just recently started peeking into our economic stance, as well as the way "the Man" (meaning the government) is run. I can just about say that I am ashamed to be American. I recently studied an article in a recent Rolling Stone. It stated that Pharmaceutical companies have been paying of politicians over $879,000 to keep slipping sneaky bills onto the steps of Capitol Hill. Why??? A wonderful preservative that your kids more than likely received through a vaccination of some type, be it flu shot or MMR vacc. The preservative is DEADLY!!!!! It Causes Autism in thousands of kids born btwn 89 and 03. Elli Lillie Knew this preservative caused Mercury to gather in the brain. Killing off Cells needed for Development, why the article???? THE US GOV TRIED TO CONCEAL THE INFO FROM THE PUBLIC!!!!!!!! the gov didn't want us to know b/c there are thousands of parents who are putting 2 and 2 2gether. The intern want compensation for a fucked up kid. I would to. But "the man" says the lawsuits would DAMAGE our defenses in Bio-Warfare.

Perhaps you should look into another scholarly journal other than Rolling Stones.

We have enough fossil fuel to keep us going for another 600-1000 years.

Liquid petroleum is just convenient. There is something like 50 times as much coal and methane hydrate lying around as there is liquid petroleum.

Running out of energy isn't the problem. It's whether or not our environment can handle 5-6 times the amount of greenhouse gasses that we are currently putting out, which is what is going to happen as the rest of the world industrializes over the next 50-100 years.

The most immediate negative effect of our dependance on petroleum products is that it's use increases our dependance on big money. Our world is increasingly being designed by and for big business, which is feeding the imbalance of power you see with the rich getting richer, and the poor getting richer, but at a substantially slower rate than the rich.

Also, it is causing many of the ultra-super-poor to become poorer because they can't compete with first world technology which they can't afford.

People need to stop thinking in terms of going to school, and then finding a nice job.

They need to start thinking in terms of going to school, and creating some nice jobs and/or reducing the need for jobs by helping develop "small technology" designed with the "little person's" best interest as it's primary design goal rather than working for some company developing consumer products for people who already have lots of stuff for themselves.